A Tibetan book of spells
Now, to turn swiftly from theory to practice, let’s look at an actual Tibetan book of spells. This book, the earliest surviving compendium of Tibetan Buddhist magical ritual, was found among the cache of thousands of manuscripts that had been sealed in a cave shrine at the beginning of the eleventh century. The shrine was part of a major Buddhist cave temple complex near the town of Dunhuang, in western China. The sealed cave was discovered by a Chinese monk in 1900, and subsequently visited by explorers from several colonial powers, who examined the manuscript cache and sent selections from it back to their own countries.
The manuscripts found in the cave were arranged in bundles and may have been the personal collections of various Buddhist monks and nuns (and perhaps some lay people). As to why the cave was sealed, several scholars have suggested the threat of imminent invasion by non-Buddhists, but this is perhaps an overly dramatic explanation. Since the cave was almost full when it was re-opened, it may be that it have simply outlived its purpose. After it was sealed, the wall was painted over with a fresco, so the driving force behind sealing the manuscript cave may just have been that a patron was paying for redecoration.1
So this is the context in which this early Buddhist book of spells came to light. It is one of several thousand Tibetan manuscripts from the cave, yet in some ways quite different from all the others. The manuscript, which has the shelfmark IOL Tib J 401, is a codex, formed of bifolios stitched along the middle with thread. When opened out, the bifolios are oblong (8 x 19 cm). This format continues in later Tibetan manuscripts, and we have examples from as late as the nineteenth century.
The Tibetan book of spells from Dunhuang (IOL Tib J 401)
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Tantric Deception 